Saturday commute lxx: So, hey, what happened?

      Shane did 

      come back, 

      huh?

An occasion of happiness and risk

To my sincere (if scarcely 

competent) delight, I dis-

covered this week the exis-

tence of something to celeb-

rate and seize upon spontan-

eously, letting comprehen-

sion's chips scatter in the

pattern it usually permits.

But even in this devil-may-

care enthusiasm, I hear a 

contradiction of myself, 

a very sound reason for not 

blogging in the first person. 

I do happen to believe in 

something of a quixotic joust 

at least, with incomprehen-

sion; and like the knight er-

rant, himself, I tend to look 

backward as well as forward, 

to accede to that peaceable 

state of comparatively impreg-

nable cognition, albeit last-

ing no longer than Mr Warhol's 
ration of fame.

Allow one to vouch, straight

off, for the contrarian but

vastly more prevalent ten-

dency of achieving this sort

of cognitive contentment in

the styles Friday has made,

with such thoughtful timeli-

ness, so irresistible. If,

however, your age is lesser

or greater than that of dis-

cretion, I ask you to imagine

or recall an exhaustion aris-

ing from the most happily 

spirited engagement, suffused 

with the most agreable shock.

It is Friday.

The most wonderful and beautiful

virtue of Friday has always been

that of poetry; and the muse has

far from subtly conscripted us to

frame ourselves in the promises

of the day in her terms. Now, it

develops that a translator of the

page's supreme supports in poetry,

Horace and Virgil, has undertaken

a new volume of his own, under the

auspices of Chicago's estimable
imprint.

Time and again, this brilliant uni-

versity press has accompanied and

stimulated learning in history, 

painting, and letters; and it has

done so again in a brand new text

which I do regard as an occasion of

happiness and risk. It rises keenly

to the demands of Friday, and espe-

cially for readers who feel them

as a kind of call to experience.

Where did you go to, when you went away?

It is as if you step by step were going

Someplace elsewhere into some range

Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,

Knowing nothing of the language of that place

To which you went with naked foot at night

Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,

Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking.

     I have been so dislanguaged by what happened

     I cannot speak the words that somewhere you

     Maybe were speaking to others where you went.

     Maybe they talk together where they are,

     Restlessly wandering, along the shore,

     Waiting for a way to cross the river.

Mr Ferry, an emeritus professor at 
a place with a pond, Wellesley, 
reminds this reader of how the in-
tensity of Friday's embraces is so 
well distributed between intimacy 
and cognition. Immediately before 
the poem here reproduced, he recalls
his magnificent translation of Virgil's
narrative of Orpheus' loss of Eurydice, 
probably the greatest heartbreak in art.

Then one comes to this contemporary text,
written with mature reflection of a life
in awareness of Orpheus, and instantly it
suits and responds to the virulent dichot-
omies of our instant: the grotesque "polar-
isation" of political parties, not only
here; the alienations in Mr Galassi's glor-
ious poems, cited repeatedly above; in yet
the tendernesses of the blithe and sweet
fellows who made us laugh in the very dark-
est times - Harlan Greene, Peter McGehee,
Joe Keenan, Ethan Mordden, too many to
name by way of limitation - and Mark Doty,
our peer of Cavafy at least, who held us
together by breaking apart for us to see.

The power of what words let us do for each
other is gorgeously sustained in this text.

I take a Friday for its genius

for risk in the exertions of

intimacy. Bang. Superb poetry.

David Ferry

Bewilderment

  New Poems and

  Translations

  

  That Now Are Wild 

  and Do Not Remember

University of Chicago Press, 2012©

This land is your land, this land is my land

  

   I quarreled with this guy,

   with guile he trained with

   his strength, for twenty

   years. I quarrel with him

   now, for the same reason:

   he is close, and I have

   still not gone so far.

      5 February 1944

      17 October 1969

   

Honolulu  1967
Yosemite   1950

rights reserved

San Gregorio, to the sea

  

    You know? In moments, the two can-

    didates for our electoral esteem

    will be toying with their talking

    points, and teasing us to treat

    them as anointed for our prefer-

    ence.

    You and I remember, and we shall

    be safe. The fog, the salt, the 

    fire, the sage, the soil, the 

    dawn. You, and I.

Driving from the ladies' tee

Who can give enough credit to George W. Bush for his discovery of the cut-up doting soccer mom, precursor of what is being called the oppressed waitress in the present election cycle? Notable for not merely voting against interest but redirecting whole dorms of the Electoral College into the counter-intuitive column, the soccer mom's availability to [evidently] any fratbreath demagogue of a cockier future has descended upon the republican consciousness as almost unimaginable in its irony, and certainly unendurable in its effects. But it has become axiomatic: if you wish to outdrive your opponent in a round of politics, tee off from the ladies' tee, set forward enough to corrupt the course.

                   It's enough to make one sen- 
                   timental for poliomyelitis. 

To observe

I am slow to observe our loss of a

superlative and necessary historian,

a writer of texts of a true and trust-

worthy bond between generations in my

own family and, if that can be the case,

in many, many others. Last August saw

the death of Sir John Keegan, OBE, the

first since Homer to take up the char-

acter of The Face of Battle and with 

scrupulous methodology, to substantiate

the poetry of the Iliad.

A distinguished lecturer at Sandhurst,

John Keegan accepted teaching fellow-

ships at my university, at Vassar, and

even here, prefacing one of his histor-

ies with touching affection for our 4-

board fencing. His gift for anatomising

the demands of command on land and on

sea served many hours of conversation

between my father and myself, but his

quite properly legendary genius for the

narrative of the battle experience did

nourish our speculative silence over his

first son, my brother.

Through John Keegan I learned to read

between the lines not only of our great

military historians of the day, Max Has-

tings and Antony Beevor, but also of the

poetry of Housman, Owen, and Brooke.

Now again the Right rises up with its

classic demagoguery of rapture in force,

to sway a fragile republic to delusions

of guaranteed security in bellicosity. 

In the name of fact, I remember John 

Keegan.

Sunday shift: what to read when it had mattered

      The once and

      future news.